6:00pm – 7:00pm   Presentation
Dinner will be served at 5:45pm
Student Law Lounge, Stanford Law School

Please join us for a discussion with Stanford History Professor Jonathan Gienapp about how the Founders approached constitutional interpretation.

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Jonathan Gienapp is an assistant professor in the history department. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Principally a scholar of Revolutionary and early republican America, he is particularly interested in the period’s political culture, constitutionalism, and intellectual history. More generally, he is interested in the method and practice of the history of ideas, especially how it might profit from mutually beneficial exchanges with other disciplines in the human sciences, particularly recent philosophy of language.

His current book project, Inventing the Fixed Constitution: Language, Justification, and Constitutional Interpretation at the American Founding (under contract with Harvard University Press), chronicles how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence while exploring how those changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture. More specifically, it investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning, in transforming the practices through which one could justifiably interpret the document, helped in the process alter how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities.

He has also written on a range of related topics pertaining to early American constitutionalism and interpretation, originalism and modern constitutional theory, and the study of the history of ideas. He has published articles in Constitutional Commentary and the Journal of the Early Republic with others soon forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review and an edited volume on neo-nullification and secession in American constitutional culture.